Hello again,
I did my first bit of "managing" last week, and I wanted to see if I was headed in the right direction. Maybe you guys can advise me?
First my set up. I have 2 10-frame deep brood boxes with brood (really pretty brood if you ask me) in both boxes. The bottom box only has comb drawn on 6 of the 10 frames,like this: E E B B B B B B E E, with all the brood having a little crown of honey. The top box looks really pretty. It has really good looking brood in the middle frames topped with a little honey in the corners, with full honey on 1 and 2 (actually bound all together) and 9, and about 1/2 of frame 10.
I put a medium super on about 2 1/2 weeks ago, when I saw they had finally drawn out the last frame in the top box. Last week I checked and they hadn't touched the mediums and that super had a bunch of adult SHB! I freaked out. There were probably about 10-20 beetles running around the frames. I squished as many as I could and then took the super off.
I inspected the top box and it looked good. Didn't see any beetles. Saw that the last frame was getting honey in it. Lot's of capped brood and some larva. When I went into the bottom box, the 4 empty frames still hadn't been touched. Hmmmm.
So here's what I did. I took frames 9 and 10 from the top box, that had honey in them, and switched them with frames 1 & 10 from the bottom box, which are bare foundation. I wanted to do 1 to 1 and 10 to 10, but as I said, frames 1 and 2 on the top are all honey combed together, and I don't feel proficient enough to try and seperate them at this time.
I've read that it is important to put the frames back in in the same order, so i'm worried about how I switched them. But they weren't touching those bottom frames. Was this ok to do to try and get them to spread out a little?
Also, I don't have any comb to "start" the medium super. What is a good way to get them to get up there and use it and guard it before the hive beetles take over? I did not put the super back on. I'm gonna freeze them and buy a trap before I do. I'm worried because I've been hearing about August swarms, and crowded bees, and I know we usually have a small fall flow here in Georgia, and they are pretty full now.
Any comments and or suggestions are greatly appreciated and eagerly awaited.
Thanks again guys, for being here. I don't know what I'd do with out you!
love,
ziffa